How to get the ID of the last insert post in WordPress

June 14, 2010

When programming for WordPress, sometimes you may need to get the ID of the last post that was inserted to the database (à la MySQL’s ‘LAST_INSERT_ID’). Here’s the thing: the wp_insert_post() function returns the newly inserted post’s ID, so you can use it to perform more stuff on the post right away, without having to mess around with any SQL commands to retrieve it. Clever, huh?

wp_insert_post()

The function wp_insert_post() does that, it inserts posts into the WP database. You only need to create a required object (or array) containing a few properties of the new post (such as post_title, post_content, post_status, etc) to get it rolling, and it will fill in any blanks you might’ve missed.

But the main point here is that the wp_insert_post() function returns the newly inserted post’s ID.